Holmes Field mosaic is facing razing

Sunday

Aug 3, 2014 at 6:00 AMAug 3, 2014 at 12:03 PM

WORCESTER — The nine children rendered in tile still dive, swim and frolic as joyfully as ever. They outlived the city pool they commemorate. They lasted longer than a business they helped launch. They remained when a patent awarded to their creator expired. They've frolicked in a corner of Holmes Field for 23 years now, but the swimming children depicted in the city's "Water Grace" mosaic won't see another summer.

By Thomas Caywood TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

WORCESTER — The nine children rendered in tile still dive, swim and frolic as joyfully as ever.

They outlived the city pool they commemorate.

They lasted longer than a business they helped launch.

They remained when a patent awarded to their creator expired.

They've frolicked in a corner of Holmes Field for 23 years now, but the swimming children depicted in the city's "Water Grace" mosaic won't see another summer.

Fearing that the block wall to which they are irrevocably affixed has become unstable and dangerous, Public Works and Parks Assistant Commissioner Robert Antonelli Jr. soon will give the order for a loader operator to knock down the wall with the machine's steel bucket.

At City Hall, Cultural Development Officer Erin Williams will then reluctantly delete the mosaic from her spreadsheet inventory of Worcester's public art.

City plans call for a major renovation of Holmes Field over the next few years including construction of an expanded playground in the corner of the park where the 35-foot-by-6-foot mosaic now stands.

"It's hard to hear that this artwork we created to last forever will come down in the next few months," said William Greenlaw, who hand-glazed tens of thousands of custom cut tiles for the project in the summer of 1991.

"It's great that they're making the park a better place for the people in the area, but it's definitely sad this important chapter of my life will be gone forever," Mr. Greenlaw said.

He had just graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a degree in art and marketing when he went to work on the mosaic project in his uncle Lance McKee's basement on Circuit Avenue.

Mr. McKee, a technical writer at the time, had been working in his spare time on design software and a manufacturing process by which elaborate tile mosaics could be cut, glazed and fired in sections held together by wire mesh embedded in the clay.

At the time, industrial mosaic production was limited to designs composed of identically sized square tiles, like the rudimentary computer graphics of the day. Mr. McKee's system was designed to make mosaics from tiles of any shape all mixed together as if cut individually by hand.

He later was awarded U.S. Patent No. 5,568,391 on Oct. 22, 1996, for an "Automated Tile Mosaic Creation System," according to government records. The technology would become the basis for an ill-fated company called Mosaica Inc.

"Water Grace" was the first big project Mr. McKee attempted using the equipment and process he was still developing in the summer of 1991. He hired his nephew, Mr. Greenlaw, to work full time on the mosaic planned for the outside wall of the Holmes Field pool house.

"I don't remember all the details, but I think we just approached the city and said, 'Hey, we can do this kind of thing and here's a proposal,' " Mr. McKee said.

The project was paid for with state arts grant money awarded by the Worcester Cultural Commission. The state and city records on the grant were misplaced or archived at some point over the years, officials said, but Mr. McKee recalls the grant was for about $3,000.

The money would prove to be barely enough to cover their costs as Mr. McKee and Mr. Greenlaw struggled to perfect the process that summer. They soon learned that off-the-shelf clay and glazes wouldn't work with the wire mesh backing.

They had to learn how to mix their own materials from scratch. A retired machinist had helped them custom build the tile cutting equipment.

"It was all just trial and error. If you looked down in the basement then, you'd have seen hundreds of sample tiles hanging everywhere, all of our tests," Mr. Greenlaw said.

The state of computer-design technology was so primitive then it took three dozen floppy disks to store the digital blueprint for the mosaic, he recalled.

The tens of thousands of irregular tiles needed for the project were to be cut by a computer-controlled water jet in hundreds of sections that could be stacked in a small kiln and fired in batches. But many of the early mosaic sections broke apart under the intense heat.

"We were kind of developing the technology as we were making this thing. That was just part of the creative process," Mr. McKee said.

Mr. Greenlaw, now the creative director for a national publishing company, ended up working in the basement full time for about three months to produce the sections of tile. The finished sections were cemented directly to the pool house wall and grouted once they were in place.

Mr. Antonelli, the city parks official, instructed crews to leave that section of wall standing when the Holmes Field pool was demolished about three years ago.

"I made a concerted effort to see if there's any way I could save the wall or save the mural, but it's attached directly to the block wall," he said. "It's gotten to the point where we need to take the wall down for the safety of residents, because that thing's ready to fall over."

The completed mosaic was dedicated on Sept. 29, 1991.

Mr. Greenlaw recalls his sense of accomplishment as the last section went up on the wall after months of false starts and hard work in a stifling basement studio.

"The last tile I set was a secret tile for people to find. It was one of the planets hidden in the sky. We hid some fish in the water and other stuff for people to find too," he said.

Mr. McKee dubbed the work "Water Grace," but that name apparently didn't stick in the collective memory of the city.

When Ms. Williams, the cultural development officer, began cataloging and mapping the city's public murals and statues last year, her staff wasn't sure what to call the Holmes Field mosaic.

"We weren't able to track it down anywhere in our system," she said. "In our listings, it's called 'Swimming Boy.' We didn't know what it was called, so that's the title we gave it to just identify what it is."

Ms. Williams has been overseeing a push to raise awareness about the city's public art resources and to commission additional works.

After she was contacted for this story, Ms. Williams spoke to Mr. Antonelli about the fate of the doomed, publicly funded artwork. He assured her that the way the mosaic was cemented to the crumbling pool house wall made moving it impractical, she said.

"If nothing else, I'm planning to go up there and take photographs of it, so it can live on in some form at least," Ms. Williams said.

The neglected mosaic had long been defaced with looping scars of black spray paint until last week. Workers scrubbed the graffiti from the tiles after the Telegram & Gazette began inquiring about the condition and future of the artwork.

If the mosaic had been attached to a backing panel separate from the block wall, it might have been possible to move it, but even that would be a stretch with such a large piece, said Worcester artist Susan Champeny.

Either way, the possibility that the city might one day close most of its neighborhood pools and tear down the buildings probably never occurred to anyone at the time "Water Grace" was installed, she said.

"It's a beautiful piece. I like it a lot. It's a simple design, but it gets the point across that this is a place to enjoy the water. I used to drive by it and smile," Ms. Champeny said.

Mr. McKee got a few smaller commissions after "Water Grace," but he had to shut down Mosaica for lack of business after a few years. The assets were sold to another company, which later worked with Ms. Champeny on a tile mosaic for the Downtown District wayfinding marker in Federal Square.

That company, Facente LLC, has since closed too.

"It's hard to do public art as a business. I guess the technology will just sort of pass into the industry now," Mr. McKee said.

His patent on the mosaic creation system expired a few years ago.

"It's too bad it's being torn down, but I understand the parks department has constrained budgets. I certainly wouldn't want it to further deteriorate to the point where it's dangerous," Mr. McKee said.

Mr. Greenlaw now lives in Hopkinton. He sees his uncle often, and they sometimes reminisce about that summer two decades ago when they were inventors, entrepreneurs and artisans obsessed with fashioning bits of clay into a lasting work of public art.

Their creation had a good run in Holmes Field, but Mr. Antonelli said he expects to tear it down before the end of the summer.

"I guess I'll have to take one last ride by it soon," Mr. Greenlaw said.